Journaling for Professional Development: Self-Reflection for Better Leadership
Actively engaging in regular self-reflection should be a familiar and fluent practice for any leader. Our ability to quickly make what feel like gut decisions on the fly is actually our subconscious ability to reference and analyze years of data gathered through education and experience in mere milliseconds and tell our brains what to do or say. Honing in on these learnings actively helps us to gain a better understanding of our decision making abilities as well as actively analyze our judgement calls in order to better curate our data set for subconscious decision making in the future.
In the book Move Fast. Break Shit. Burn Out., authors Tracey Lovejoy and Shannon Lucas point out that oftentimes our “strong intuition is actually a thorough data-collection mechanism that eliminates a great deal of the unknown.” That in decision-making moments, many of us “process data at lightning speed” using information from former “conversations, experience, research, emotional intelligence, subconscious observations, and overt data.” I love this book and have recommended it to many friends and colleagues with whom I share similar “catalyst” behaviors (so I do use an affiliate link to make commission so I can benefit while also genuinely sharing my love for it).
Taking the time to consciously process these things can help us not only feel more confident in our decision-making abilities and intuitions or gut feelings, but also improve our data sets with richer context and nuance for future decision-making opportunities.
One effective method for this practice is journaling, and I really like this format from the article To Be An Effective Leader Keep a Leadership Journal published by Forbes. We’ll walk through the specific journaling method here, but I recommend reading the article for context.
The article poses a set of enlightening or self-reflection questions one can ask oneself through journaling. Those are below along with a couple I’ve added for myself over the years (* are mine). The article recommends starting with one question and encourages the use of bullet point answers if that’s helpful. I typically choose one question and write through it, rather than bullet pointing through the whole list because that’s just my writing/thinking style. Regardless of your particular style, I believe the most effective leaders practice this kind of reflection daily.
- What’s present for me now?
- What’s going well? What’s creating that?
- What’s challenging? What’s creating that?
- What needs my attention?
- What’s meaningful?
- What strengths do I notice in myself?
- What strengths and contributions do I notice in others?
- What am I learning?
- What is an action I am committing to?
- *What am I avoiding or procrastinating completing? Why?
- *What’s distracting that I should be deprioritizing or delegating?
As always, I find it super helpful to see examples of what this might look like for someone before trying it myself. This will look different for everyone, and the depth of each answer will vary depending on role, context, and personality. Here are a couple of examples from me.
What’s distracting that I should be deprioritizing or delegating?
I’ve had a couple items on my to-do list for a couple weeks that keep making me feel like I’m not focused at work, not getting enough done. There are two follow ups with other teams that an indirect leader on my team passed down to me to complete. I’m unsure how to have these conversations effectively with the teams that need to be engaged.
Thinking through it, one of my team’s collaborators from our product group would be the best to coordinate these discussions and align across teams. I’m wasting my time and energy trying to come up with a solution on how to handle it myself when I should just be delegating it and letting the right group handle it. I can point out what’s important, the continuity, the documentation needed, the understanding across groups and the need to standardize and communicate. But he should be the one to do the coordination across teams because it fits within his role and he has the natural relationships with the right partners due to his role.
I love this question! What’s distracting? This item has been making me itch looking at it on my to do list! But now, having taken a moment to think about what might be distracting me, where I might be spending energy inappropriately, I have a clear path forward to not only accomplish the tasks, but also to execute them much more effectively through the right channels.
What am I learning?
I had to have a difficult, managing up, kind of conversation with my boss this week. It was good to have it and I am learning that sometimes, I need to explain something multiple times in multiple ways with varying language for it to land correctly. Thankfully, I have a patient boss who is willing to question and go back and forth in conversation until we understand each other. In future, however, I think I need to preplan more language so that I can more quickly cut to the chase, and pay attention to the phrases and words that hit home and more quickly make sense in our conversations. This will help me continue to speak a common language between us and more effectively express myself. One specific is that I need to focus on what I am trying to achieve, not what I am saying “No” to. For instance, I was reviewing my reasons for not wanting to take on a particular piece of work immediately due to protecting the team’s time and motivation. But if I had started by explaining why the team needed protecting (because my boss is just not that close to the day-to-day to know this), then when I pushed back on the immediacy of the item, it would have made sense. So in future, I will set the stage without assuming my boss is aware of some of the details.
I completed both of these entries real time for this specific blog and these were real-time learnings as I was writing. For the second one, I started in my head with “I’m learning that I need to work harder at these conversations,” but I ended with clear changes I can make to better communicate. Just by taking time to reflect via this journaling method, I’m able to adjust my approach and be more effective in the future. This exercise took less than 2 minutes and I have clear actionable insights to practice going forward!
I hope you find this method as useful as I do! Let me know in the comments!
Be sure to check out my other methods for Journaling for Professional Development:
